Lessons Learned From Vietnam War

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Satayana in his 1905 The Life of Reason. It’s become a maxim as much as a rationale to convince teenagers to study history. There is a logic there that’s prevalent in popular culture, one must confront their past to move on. Rafiki, the monkey-shaman from Disney’s The Lion King, puts it thusly: “you can either run from [your past] or you can learn from it.” The philosophy remains relevant, be it in one’s personal life or the government of a nation

Which makes it quite baffling to see how blatantly the United States seems to contentedly ignore what’s happened in the past as they carry out their military policy. A formal report issued around the time of the Vietnam War

“For a newly ascendent far right, Vietnam became a just war that the left wing had not had the will or courage to win” (Johnson 60); if they wanted to emerge victorious, the United States had to commit fully and see it through. Conversely, Christian Appy noted that the Reagan Administration took that “the central lesson of Vietnam was not that foreign policy had to be more democratic, but the opposite: it had to become even more the province of national security managers who operated without the close scrutiny of the media” (60). Lessons like these chose to “adhere to a common analytical framework, one that treated Vietnam as an anomaly” (131). These narratives encouraged a more militaristic approach to foreign policy, one that extended a hand while keeping a knife firmly held in the other. The takeaway was that were this to happen again, what could be done to ensure that this time the United States would emerge

During the Vietnam War, when recruits were sent through the town, the downtown became “a free-for-all of alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and fisticuffs, as well as camaraderie and play” (Lutz, 133). The enlarged military presence during the Cold War brought with it a sudden wave of crime and camp followers, negatively affecting civilians who had lived in the area for years. The economic impact of Fort Bragg is immense too, with much of business done revolving around the base. There’s little in the way of a technology sector or other high level jobs, rather “as the post continued to grow through the 1970s and 1980s, it’s economy was increasingly based on selling goods and services to soldiers, creating retail jobs that pay less than any other category of work”